JUST a week ago, I was watching John Bowman's television show, on which Gerry Adams turned out to be the star performer, this being just after the police raids on Sinn Fein premises and the discovery of documents which the Northern Ireland police claimed to be evidence of a successful conspiracy to steal confidential documents, including correspondence between the British Prime Minister and the President of the United States.

In its own ghastly way, Gerry Adams's broadcast performance was quite impressive. John Bowman pressed him quite hard, particularly on the continued retention of IRA weapons, but Adams responded with cool effrontery. He brushed aside the awkward questions and developed the theme of how awful it was for the Northern Ireland police to search the premises of a legitimate political party. Such a thing, he thought, could not happen in any other democratic country.

He didn't deign to consider the question of whether there is any other democratic country in which a political party is the front for a private army.

There was nothing much in the exchanges between Bowman and Adams to surprise me. What did surprise me quite a bit was the nature of the contributions from other members of the panel and then from the floor. None of these speakers made any serious challenge to Gerry Adams.

Michael McDowell was the first to speak. He has been pretty tough on the IRA in the past and I expected him to challenge Gerry Adams vigorously. But he didn't. He took Adams's contributions seriously, and refrained from any offensive references to links with private armies.

Adams looked quite pleased. The other members of the panel who spoke were generally supportive of Adams and so were the speakers from the floor.

There was only one surprise at least to me in Adams's own contribution. When Bowman asked the question: "Did infiltrating documents surprise you?" Adams replied simply, "No." He did not develop that laconic offering but went on to attack what he called "newspaper spin" by which he seemed to mean anything unfavourable anybody might write about Sinn Fein-IRA.

I would like to think that the panel's reluctance to criticise Sinn Fein was atypical, but I fear it is not. Most people in the republic don't support Sinn Fein, but they don't like to criticise it either. They are more inclined to look the other way and talk about something else. The reasons for this go right back to Patrick Pearse. The modern IRA's claim to descent from Pearse is not explicitly accepted by most Irish people, but it is not easy to contest and is seldom contested.

IF these islands were left to themselves, I believe that Sinn Fein-IRA would continue to flourish, while the IRA retained all the weapons they want to retain, with the permanent and rewarding threat these pose. Both the British and Irish governments are prepared to go along with that, though with some differences of emphasis.

But the two governments are not about to be left to themselves. The shadow of the United States is already falling over the political landscape of these islands and is about to grow deeper.

The IRA's military involvement with a private army FARC which is hostile to the United States was a huge mistake for which Sinn Fein has already paid a high price, and which may yet cost Sinn Fein-IRA its very existence.

Already the so-called "Friends of Ireland" in America, once outstandingly supportive of anything Sinn Fein-IRA said and did, have virtually ceased to exist. The days when Gerry Adams was a welcome guest in the White House are over for good.

After the convictions of the Colombia Three which I regard as virtually certain the American pressure on the British and Irish generals to isolate and then eliminate Sinn Fein-IRA will increase to the point where it can no longer be resisted.

But even today there is already a powerful American presence in Northern Ireland. After the FARC disclosures, it was inevitable that the CIA should become involved in Northern Ireland and I believe they are there now in force. The British government would have liked to hush up the disclosures about the thefts of documents but couldn't because the CIA had got word of the thefts.

I believe the growing American involvement will have proved fatal to Sinn Fein-IRA before another year is out.